The music industry has an even worse problem. Historically, musicians were nobodies - servants and worse. Only during the period when the economics of one to many record manufacturing turned some musicians into "brands" was it a big-money business. Today anybody can make a recording, and the only edge the remaining record companies have is marketing and a back catalog. Billboard points out that the top-grossing band of 2011, Bon Jovi, made 90% of their money touring. Those are the economics of a top performer in the era of Edison wax cylinder recording.
BusyBox is just some standard UNIX utilities in one executable. BSD has all the necessary code. The BSD license doesn't require source redistribution. Putting together a BusyBox replacement shouldn't be a big deal.
A useful metric for law enforcement organizations is what fraction of their work is self-generated, and what fraction is complaint-driven. When a police department responds to a call to 911 or a crime report, they're performing a service function. When they run a drug sting, they're doing self-generated work. Some self-generated law enforcement work is useful and necessary, but too much of it corrupts an organization.
The FBI was traditionally complaint-driven. Historically, their self-generated work didn't go well. The Red Squads and the investigation of the civil rights movement of the Hoover era are historical examples.
The FBI's anti-terrorism operation is mostly self-generated work. So is their Internet operation. (40% of FBI Internet investigative resources are devoted to kiddie porn. Most of the rest is "national security". Fraud on the Internet, about 4%. The FBI is soft on Internet fraud - stopping that takes real work, and results are measurable.)
Measurability is the big issue here. On their complaint-based work, law enforcement success rates are easily measured. There were N bank robberies last year, and the people who did M of them were caught. Success rate: M / N. Running a law enforcement operation on that basis keeps it productive and honest. Metrics for self-generated police work tend to be less meaningful. The US has had so little terrorism in the last decade that metrics for that are mostly have an N of zero.
Measurability was William Bratton's approach. Bratton headed the Boston PD, the NYPD, and the LAPD, and is generally considered to have improved all of them. He was big on measuring results, and put in systems to track, on a daily basis, how his cops were doing against crooks. There was a lot of software and mapping involved, and twice-weekly crime strategy meetings. In a big department, it was quite possible to have a whole crime spree before someone at the command level noticed a pattern. He fixed that. Focusing his cops on solving identified problems tended to keep his departments pointed in the right direction.
Los Alamos tried one out. They were satisfied with the radiation safety. Of course, their people wore their routine three dosimeters (cumulative, short term, and alarming.)
A gamma source used for X-raying that is powerful enough to go through 6 inches of steel would require a radiation exclusion zone around the vehicle. The driver would have to exit the truck and move outside the zone.
"Since VACIS inspection products use radioactive sources in this
process, the End User is responsible for obtaining and abiding by all necessary and appropriate
approvals from the applicable cognizant regulatory agencies or authorities in their country of use.
Buyer/End User is responsible for safely operating the system in accordance with all SAIC
instructions/manuals and training and any applicable regulations/requirements of the jurisdictions in
which the system will be operated. Buyer/End User shall consult with the relevant licensing authority
regarding whether and in what manner disclosures (including signage) should be made to persons who
may be scanned by VACIS inspection products as incidental occupants of vehicles. SAIC is not
responsible for any claims, actions or liabilities associated with the improper installation, operation or
maintenance of the products. Improper operation would include, but not be limited to, failure to
comply with any conditions, requirements, safety measures and procedures provided or required by
SAIC and/or any cognizant regulatory agency."
Their video shows someone driving a car through the thing.
(The add-on works fine under Firefox 10. It's Mozilla's download/upgrade/update/approve system, "AMO", that's broken. I have some of the same add-ons for both Firefox and Google Chrome, and the Google Chrome store system works much better than Mozilla's. This reflects Mozilla's focus on the browser being in control, rather than being a slave to the "cloud". Firefox updating and their "AMO" try to slave their browser to their servers. Mozilla isn't very good at that.)
It will be interesting to see audited numbers from Facebook. Look for deferred expenses, future revenue accrued in the present, and expenses being capitalized.
The classic is that AOL capitalized their free AOL disks, rather than treating them as a marketing expense in the current year. When the SEC caught them on that, they had to restate several years of financials, and it turned out they became profitable six years after they said they did.
Groupon had similar problems with accounting for marketing expenses. This is a classic issue (or scam) with dot-coms which threw money at getting market share.
A lot of what he goes over are basically examples of known fallacies that didn't actually get eliminated from the science - the back pain anecdote is particularly good for that.
I was treated by one of the Stanford doctors who discovered that. The problem was simply that not enough healthy people had been given MRI scans. MRI machines were very rare and expensive at first, and not much machine time was available for clinical studies. Once they were able to image large numbers of healthy volunteers to get baseline data, and MRI resolution improved, it became clearer what was going on.
Many people have commented that 10cm is up there in artillery-shell caliber. This new bullet is 10cm long. The pictures show something that's in a typical small-arms caliber, probably 9mm or smaller. It will require a special gun that can chamber an unusually long cartridge, but not an artillery piece.
The real win with this thing will be hitting moving targets. No more estimating range and leading the target. Just keep pointed at it. Sighting and designator system that can lock onto a target already exist, and shrinking them down to rifle-scope size isn't all that hard. There's more video processing going on in any modern video camera or phone.
The stories about this board need to stop, at least until they ship the thing. "We bought the parts". "We soldered them on", etc. do not each need a separate story.
Of course you don't ship kits of SMD parts, especially ball-grid array parts. Such a soldering job is cheap in a production environment, and a huge pain even with the right equipment in a small shop. (It's done in production by printing a solder paste layer on the board with a mask, and the final alignment of the pads is done by surface tension in the molten solder. It's all about temperature control and solder paste depositing. Once the production line is tuned right, it works quite consistently.)
This has been going on for decades. House brands of "white goods" appliances have been around since at least the 1960s. VHS players were amusing; there were only five different VHS mechanisms, but hundreds of plastic bezels.
Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose, which makes most of the bottom-shelf booze on the West Coast, takes in ethanol in tank cars, tap water, and flavoring, and turns out about 1000 differently labeled liquor products. They only have about 100 different recipes, and an advanced automated bottling line that can change bottle types and labels without a shutdown.
Space would have become a USAF business in the US. The USAF had the Dyna-Soar program (small manned craft, launched on a rocket, lands on wings), which was cancelled in favor of Apollo. The USAF also had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was a lot like Skylab, but earlier. The USAF would probably have sizable manned space stations by now, equipped with missile defenses.
The Gusmobile (the six-seat Gemini) might have flown. With both the Gusmobile and Dyna-Soar, the US would have had a solid low-orbit manned capability.
More robotic landers would have been sent to the Moon. The USSR sent several large ones, which explored more of the Moon than the astronauts did. But landing and retrieving humans from the moon probably would have been skipped. Face it, the place is rather dull.
Recoverable boosters probably would have been developed. (A parachute system almost went into the Saturn V.)
At some point, a large shuttle might have been built. Probably more like Buran than the US shuttle. Although Buran looks like the US shuttle, it has no launch engines; it's purely a payload at launch. Buran was much less fragile than the US shuttle; the USSR once flew one to Farnborough for an air show. Also, it was realized after a few US shuttle launches that a titanium-based design could stand the heat load, which would have eliminated the ceramic tile headache. A more robust shuttle with mostly reusable boosters could achieve a respectable launch rate.
Facebook has already reached maximum growth, and future efforts to monetize the service will only alienate users. This IPO is simply a huge cash payoff to the private investors, the owner and friends of the owner, because Facebook is no longer a "growth" company.
Mod parent up.
Look at Facebook's Alexa traffic graph. Grew continuously until mid-2011; flat since then. Once past the growth period, a stock should be priced based on its revenue.
I just performed a quick survey of a dozen kids hanging out at my house (my kids and their friends)... and no one under 14 had any idea what myspace was. They're all on Facebook, even the ones under 13, and most are on Google+ as well.
Ask them how often they check Facebook, and do they check it more, or less, than a few months ago.
If you have any interest in politics or world affairs: The Economist.
Of course. Everybody who's anybody reads the Economist. This is an important time to read it, because the international financial system is under great stress and something is about to break. US coverage of that subject is nonexistent.
What you quote from wikipedia about the SR-71 is what we are TOLD about it.
There aren't many secrets left about the SR-71. There's one (the early M-21 variant, with a Tagboard drone on top) at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle. The museum has all the maintenance documentation for the plane. The pilot's manual is on line.
The X-15 was quite different from the SR-71. The whole point of the SR-71 was that it could cruise for hours at Mach 3. The X-15 was a rocket plane which spent a few minutes max in powered flight.
Sounds like the rap group has a good copyright claim against Universal. Why haven't they filed complaints to have Universal's product yanked off the market?
This is normal US red-state behavior. At any major US gun show, you can pick up books on bomb-making, IEDs, etc. Plus enough weaponry to start your own army. If you want an AK-47, there's AK-47man.com. He's a Colorado dealer seen at many gun shows.
Here's an AK-47 for sale. $475 gets you a Romanian AK-47, 2 30 round magazines, a carrying case,and bayonet. 1 year warranty.
Don't forget the ammo! Get ready for deer season now!
There was one event a few years ago where some attack on a network resulted in a signal outage. That was because the long-haul links to wayside signal controllers went over an IP network.
But those aren't safety related. The safety logic is all local, in wayside boxes. That's where the train detection to signal control logic is. The long-haul connections are for dispatching - which train goes where, setting up routes, etc. Both the dispatching and safety information have to agree to produce a green light.
An outage of the links to the dispatcher turns signals red and stops trains. Such outages happen occasionally, and they're a huge headache, but not a safety issue. As a backup, trains can be given train orders by voice radio, but they're limited by slow-speed operation in that mode.
Read the original article. Read Google's non-prosecution agreement with DOJ, in which Google admits to felonies and agrees to pay $500 million to avoid criminal prosecution. All this has been out in the public record for months.
This was not about "Canadian pharmacies". DOJ was led to investigate Google because they were investigating some Mexican drug dealer who had an "online pharmacy" as a side business. DOJ set up a blatantly illegal web site, "www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look "as if a Mexican drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids.". Then they used a convicted con man to negotiate with Google AdWords sales reps to promote it. Google reps not only accepted the ads, they helped with getting around Google's automatic checks. Google even extended credit to the phony site.
The DOJ tried even more blatant sites, and Google accepted the ads. All the communications with Google were recorded, of course, and presented to a grand jury. Peter Neronha, the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island, who headed this effort, said "We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on".
Google is on probation for two years. One slip-up in the drug area, and DOJ, at their sole discretion, can re-institute the criminal charges.
Has Google cleaned up their act? Search for "no prescription diet pills" and see what ads show up.
if an HTTPS site uses a certificate that's domain validated, Dragon raises a warning "that the organization operating it may not have undergone trusted third-party validation that it is a legitimate business."
I'm all in favor of checking whether a commercial site has an identifiable, legitimate business behind it. We do that with SiteTruth, and it filters out a huge number of junk sites. We divide SSL certs into three categories - "domain control only validated", "business validated", and "extended validation". A "domain control only" cert has no identify value. The CA/Browser Forum is formalizing this distinction with their new cert issuance guidelines. The 3 levels of certs are now an industry wide standard.
SSL certs aren't the only game in town.
There are other hard data sources for validating web sites. We use SSL certs, BBB and BBBonline records, purchased commercial databases of businesses, US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and a few other sources. If a site is selling something and comes up empty in all of those, maybe you should buy from someone else.
I'm not saying that such sites should be blocked by a browser, though. Moved down in search results, yes. Users warned, yes. Hard blocked, no. (However, links to them in emails, tweets, and forum posts are a good indication of spam.)
Comodo has something of a conflict of interest in checking for certs, but they do accept certs other than their own. It's not a paid "Seal of Approval" racket.
The legal problems are solveable. We already have a whole insurance system in place to deal with auto accident liability. The only question is how much auto insurance will cost for driverless vehicles. Once there's some experience with them, insurance rates can be set.
The legal history of air bags is helpful here. When air bags were first developed, there were real worries that they might deploy when not needed and cause accidents. That's why air bag controllers have logging of the last few seconds, and why that data is collected and analyzed. It took a few years and a few thousand crashes to get that tuned properly. Now it's a non-issue.
There are many practical problems to be solved, especially for driving in congested areas. But most of those problems are known, and can be solved one at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
The music industry has an even worse problem. Historically, musicians were nobodies - servants and worse. Only during the period when the economics of one to many record manufacturing turned some musicians into "brands" was it a big-money business. Today anybody can make a recording, and the only edge the remaining record companies have is marketing and a back catalog. Billboard points out that the top-grossing band of 2011, Bon Jovi, made 90% of their money touring. Those are the economics of a top performer in the era of Edison wax cylinder recording.
BusyBox is just some standard UNIX utilities in one executable. BSD has all the necessary code. The BSD license doesn't require source redistribution. Putting together a BusyBox replacement shouldn't be a big deal.
A useful metric for law enforcement organizations is what fraction of their work is self-generated, and what fraction is complaint-driven. When a police department responds to a call to 911 or a crime report, they're performing a service function. When they run a drug sting, they're doing self-generated work. Some self-generated law enforcement work is useful and necessary, but too much of it corrupts an organization.
The FBI was traditionally complaint-driven. Historically, their self-generated work didn't go well. The Red Squads and the investigation of the civil rights movement of the Hoover era are historical examples.
The FBI's anti-terrorism operation is mostly self-generated work. So is their Internet operation. (40% of FBI Internet investigative resources are devoted to kiddie porn. Most of the rest is "national security". Fraud on the Internet, about 4%. The FBI is soft on Internet fraud - stopping that takes real work, and results are measurable.)
Measurability is the big issue here. On their complaint-based work, law enforcement success rates are easily measured. There were N bank robberies last year, and the people who did M of them were caught. Success rate: M / N. Running a law enforcement operation on that basis keeps it productive and honest. Metrics for self-generated police work tend to be less meaningful. The US has had so little terrorism in the last decade that metrics for that are mostly have an N of zero.
Measurability was William Bratton's approach. Bratton headed the Boston PD, the NYPD, and the LAPD, and is generally considered to have improved all of them. He was big on measuring results, and put in systems to track, on a daily basis, how his cops were doing against crooks. There was a lot of software and mapping involved, and twice-weekly crime strategy meetings. In a big department, it was quite possible to have a whole crime spree before someone at the command level noticed a pattern. He fixed that. Focusing his cops on solving identified problems tended to keep his departments pointed in the right direction.
Los Alamos tried one out. They were satisfied with the radiation safety. Of course, their people wore their routine three dosimeters (cumulative, short term, and alarming.)
A gamma source used for X-raying that is powerful enough to go through 6 inches of steel would require a radiation exclusion zone around the vehicle. The driver would have to exit the truck and move outside the zone.
It really is a radioactive gamma source mounted on a truck. It's supposed to be used only on uninhabited vehicles. SAIC's "terms and conditions" for the thing are posted. Here's SAIC's disclaimer:
"Since VACIS inspection products use radioactive sources in this process, the End User is responsible for obtaining and abiding by all necessary and appropriate approvals from the applicable cognizant regulatory agencies or authorities in their country of use. Buyer/End User is responsible for safely operating the system in accordance with all SAIC instructions/manuals and training and any applicable regulations/requirements of the jurisdictions in which the system will be operated. Buyer/End User shall consult with the relevant licensing authority regarding whether and in what manner disclosures (including signage) should be made to persons who may be scanned by VACIS inspection products as incidental occupants of vehicles. SAIC is not responsible for any claims, actions or liabilities associated with the improper installation, operation or maintenance of the products. Improper operation would include, but not be limited to, failure to comply with any conditions, requirements, safety measures and procedures provided or required by SAIC and/or any cognizant regulatory agency."
Their video shows someone driving a car through the thing.
At least for one of my add-ons, they broke compatibility. That one shows "Not available for Firefox 10.0". Mozilla announced "All add-ons will be made compatible by default in the upcoming Firefox 10 release", but it didn't work.
(The add-on works fine under Firefox 10. It's Mozilla's download/upgrade/update/approve system, "AMO", that's broken. I have some of the same add-ons for both Firefox and Google Chrome, and the Google Chrome store system works much better than Mozilla's. This reflects Mozilla's focus on the browser being in control, rather than being a slave to the "cloud". Firefox updating and their "AMO" try to slave their browser to their servers. Mozilla isn't very good at that.)
It will be interesting to see audited numbers from Facebook. Look for deferred expenses, future revenue accrued in the present, and expenses being capitalized.
The classic is that AOL capitalized their free AOL disks, rather than treating them as a marketing expense in the current year. When the SEC caught them on that, they had to restate several years of financials, and it turned out they became profitable six years after they said they did.
Groupon had similar problems with accounting for marketing expenses. This is a classic issue (or scam) with dot-coms which threw money at getting market share.
A lot of what he goes over are basically examples of known fallacies that didn't actually get eliminated from the science - the back pain anecdote is particularly good for that.
I was treated by one of the Stanford doctors who discovered that. The problem was simply that not enough healthy people had been given MRI scans. MRI machines were very rare and expensive at first, and not much machine time was available for clinical studies. Once they were able to image large numbers of healthy volunteers to get baseline data, and MRI resolution improved, it became clearer what was going on.
The Republican presidential candidates are so bad this year because the Republicans who are any good are sitting this one out and waiting for 2016. The current candidates are the second team.
Many people have commented that 10cm is up there in artillery-shell caliber. This new bullet is 10cm long. The pictures show something that's in a typical small-arms caliber, probably 9mm or smaller. It will require a special gun that can chamber an unusually long cartridge, but not an artillery piece.
The real win with this thing will be hitting moving targets. No more estimating range and leading the target. Just keep pointed at it. Sighting and designator system that can lock onto a target already exist, and shrinking them down to rifle-scope size isn't all that hard. There's more video processing going on in any modern video camera or phone.
The stories about this board need to stop, at least until they ship the thing. "We bought the parts". "We soldered them on", etc. do not each need a separate story.
Of course you don't ship kits of SMD parts, especially ball-grid array parts. Such a soldering job is cheap in a production environment, and a huge pain even with the right equipment in a small shop. (It's done in production by printing a solder paste layer on the board with a mask, and the final alignment of the pads is done by surface tension in the molten solder. It's all about temperature control and solder paste depositing. Once the production line is tuned right, it works quite consistently.)
This has been going on for decades. House brands of "white goods" appliances have been around since at least the 1960s. VHS players were amusing; there were only five different VHS mechanisms, but hundreds of plastic bezels.
Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose, which makes most of the bottom-shelf booze on the West Coast, takes in ethanol in tank cars, tap water, and flavoring, and turns out about 1000 differently labeled liquor products. They only have about 100 different recipes, and an advanced automated bottling line that can change bottle types and labels without a shutdown.
If it weren't for pirated content, few people would need big hard drives. I mean, really, a terabyte on the desktop?
It's really hard to fill a big hard drive without pirating stuff. I was just looking at my hard drive space consumption. I have on it:
This all adds up to about 200GB.
If it weren't for piracy, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.
Space would have become a USAF business in the US. The USAF had the Dyna-Soar program (small manned craft, launched on a rocket, lands on wings), which was cancelled in favor of Apollo. The USAF also had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was a lot like Skylab, but earlier. The USAF would probably have sizable manned space stations by now, equipped with missile defenses.
The Gusmobile (the six-seat Gemini) might have flown. With both the Gusmobile and Dyna-Soar, the US would have had a solid low-orbit manned capability.
More robotic landers would have been sent to the Moon. The USSR sent several large ones, which explored more of the Moon than the astronauts did. But landing and retrieving humans from the moon probably would have been skipped. Face it, the place is rather dull.
Recoverable boosters probably would have been developed. (A parachute system almost went into the Saturn V.) At some point, a large shuttle might have been built. Probably more like Buran than the US shuttle. Although Buran looks like the US shuttle, it has no launch engines; it's purely a payload at launch. Buran was much less fragile than the US shuttle; the USSR once flew one to Farnborough for an air show. Also, it was realized after a few US shuttle launches that a titanium-based design could stand the heat load, which would have eliminated the ceramic tile headache. A more robust shuttle with mostly reusable boosters could achieve a respectable launch rate.
Facebook has already reached maximum growth, and future efforts to monetize the service will only alienate users. This IPO is simply a huge cash payoff to the private investors, the owner and friends of the owner, because Facebook is no longer a "growth" company.
Mod parent up.
Look at Facebook's Alexa traffic graph. Grew continuously until mid-2011; flat since then. Once past the growth period, a stock should be priced based on its revenue.
I just performed a quick survey of a dozen kids hanging out at my house (my kids and their friends)... and no one under 14 had any idea what myspace was. They're all on Facebook, even the ones under 13, and most are on Google+ as well.
Ask them how often they check Facebook, and do they check it more, or less, than a few months ago.
If you have any interest in politics or world affairs: The Economist.
Of course. Everybody who's anybody reads the Economist. This is an important time to read it, because the international financial system is under great stress and something is about to break. US coverage of that subject is nonexistent.
What you quote from wikipedia about the SR-71 is what we are TOLD about it.
There aren't many secrets left about the SR-71. There's one (the early M-21 variant, with a Tagboard drone on top) at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle. The museum has all the maintenance documentation for the plane. The pilot's manual is on line.
The X-15 was quite different from the SR-71. The whole point of the SR-71 was that it could cruise for hours at Mach 3. The X-15 was a rocket plane which spent a few minutes max in powered flight.
Now what? Will Google acquire Myspace and pick up the kids still on there?
(Does Myspace still actually have members, or is it just a promotional site for entertainment now?)
Sounds like the rap group has a good copyright claim against Universal. Why haven't they filed complaints to have Universal's product yanked off the market?
This is normal US red-state behavior. At any major US gun show, you can pick up books on bomb-making, IEDs, etc. Plus enough weaponry to start your own army. If you want an AK-47, there's AK-47man.com. He's a Colorado dealer seen at many gun shows.
Here's an AK-47 for sale. $475 gets you a Romanian AK-47, 2 30 round magazines, a carrying case,and bayonet. 1 year warranty. Don't forget the ammo! Get ready for deer season now!
There was one event a few years ago where some attack on a network resulted in a signal outage. That was because the long-haul links to wayside signal controllers went over an IP network.
But those aren't safety related. The safety logic is all local, in wayside boxes. That's where the train detection to signal control logic is. The long-haul connections are for dispatching - which train goes where, setting up routes, etc. Both the dispatching and safety information have to agree to produce a green light.
An outage of the links to the dispatcher turns signals red and stops trains. Such outages happen occasionally, and they're a huge headache, but not a safety issue. As a backup, trains can be given train orders by voice radio, but they're limited by slow-speed operation in that mode.
Read the original article. Read Google's non-prosecution agreement with DOJ, in which Google admits to felonies and agrees to pay $500 million to avoid criminal prosecution. All this has been out in the public record for months.
This was not about "Canadian pharmacies". DOJ was led to investigate Google because they were investigating some Mexican drug dealer who had an "online pharmacy" as a side business. DOJ set up a blatantly illegal web site, "www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look "as if a Mexican drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids.". Then they used a convicted con man to negotiate with Google AdWords sales reps to promote it. Google reps not only accepted the ads, they helped with getting around Google's automatic checks. Google even extended credit to the phony site.
The DOJ tried even more blatant sites, and Google accepted the ads. All the communications with Google were recorded, of course, and presented to a grand jury. Peter Neronha, the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island, who headed this effort, said "We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on".
Google is on probation for two years. One slip-up in the drug area, and DOJ, at their sole discretion, can re-institute the criminal charges.
Has Google cleaned up their act? Search for "no prescription diet pills" and see what ads show up.
if an HTTPS site uses a certificate that's domain validated, Dragon raises a warning "that the organization operating it may not have undergone trusted third-party validation that it is a legitimate business."
I'm all in favor of checking whether a commercial site has an identifiable, legitimate business behind it. We do that with SiteTruth, and it filters out a huge number of junk sites. We divide SSL certs into three categories - "domain control only validated", "business validated", and "extended validation". A "domain control only" cert has no identify value. The CA/Browser Forum is formalizing this distinction with their new cert issuance guidelines. The 3 levels of certs are now an industry wide standard.
SSL certs aren't the only game in town. There are other hard data sources for validating web sites. We use SSL certs, BBB and BBBonline records, purchased commercial databases of businesses, US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and a few other sources. If a site is selling something and comes up empty in all of those, maybe you should buy from someone else.
I'm not saying that such sites should be blocked by a browser, though. Moved down in search results, yes. Users warned, yes. Hard blocked, no. (However, links to them in emails, tweets, and forum posts are a good indication of spam.)
Comodo has something of a conflict of interest in checking for certs, but they do accept certs other than their own. It's not a paid "Seal of Approval" racket.
The legal problems are solveable. We already have a whole insurance system in place to deal with auto accident liability. The only question is how much auto insurance will cost for driverless vehicles. Once there's some experience with them, insurance rates can be set.
The legal history of air bags is helpful here. When air bags were first developed, there were real worries that they might deploy when not needed and cause accidents. That's why air bag controllers have logging of the last few seconds, and why that data is collected and analyzed. It took a few years and a few thousand crashes to get that tuned properly. Now it's a non-issue.
There are many practical problems to be solved, especially for driving in congested areas. But most of those problems are known, and can be solved one at a time.